Although most cancers are detected by clinical and radiological examination, pathology is the gold standard for the diagnosis of different types of cancer, including breast cancer.
The accuracy of the pathologic examination depends on the appropriate preparation and slicing of the specimen, in particular when the lesions are small. This is especially true in breast cancer, with a high percentage of early detected cancer, for example ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), where lesions are typically small. As the early detected cancers provide no haptic feedback and are invisible to the pathologist, the specimen has to be sampled carefully in order to minimize the number of missed cancers.
Pathologists generally need a number of histologically prepared sections from a tissue specimen. These sections are photographed using microscopic photography. The specimen can be obtained by a surgical procedure or by biopsy, in which a tissue sample is removed from the body.
The histological slices typically represent a common set of sections selected to provide information for diagnosis and treatment monitoring, for example by determining the type of pathologic lesion and its extent. This suite of sections are produced by following a slicing scheme, and for example includes at least one section along the long axis of the specimen, at least one to two sections on each side of the tissue specimen transversing the long axis, and at least three to four sections from the center of the lesion. The number of slices typically increases with the size of the lesion. A description of the preparation of histological sections is given, for example, in appendix H of Ackerman's Surgical Pathology, 8th Edition (1996).
WO 98/36682 discloses a system for facilitating pathological examination of a lesion in tissue, in which the lesion is optically scanned using confocal optics to generate confocal images representing microscopic sections of a lesion to provide information traditionally available to a pathologist by viewing, under a microscope, slides of a suite of histologically prepared sections of a lesion. Moreover, the cited document discloses storage of such confocal images and their transfer from one location to a pathologist at a remote location for their interpretation.